Production Line PLC Upgrade

Adsyst were able to move our clients’ existing technology into the future, providing a first-class solution.

The Background:

Our client is a leading food manufacturer, with a brand that is known in most households. They currently employ over 25,000 people. They’re a fast-growing, international, chilled-food business with operations in more than 10 countries.

The Challenge:

Several areas of the production process are controlled by SattCon 05 PLCs. This model of PLC is becoming obsolete and difficult to support concerning the hardware and programming software. The programming software is DOS-based and does not run well on XP/Win 7 machines.

The SattCon 05s currently control Milk and Cream Pasteurisers, Cream Density, Evaporators, Separators and Steritubes (UHT).

The Solution:

Adsyst was awarded this project to replace 8 SattCon 05s with 4 new Siemens S7-1500 PLCs. This reduced communication traffic and aids fault finding and maintenance. Also, the new S7-1500 utilised Red Lion Protocol converters to communicate to the existing Process Plant PLCs (SattCon 200s) via SattBus.

The Results:

Adsyst converted all existing PLCs to new reliable Siemens S7-1500 PLCs

As well as converting the software and PLC hardware, new panels were built to house the S7-1500 IO which was on a ProfiNet network.

Adsyst installed a new site-wide fibre network that now had three separate networks for inter-PLC communications, Profinet for remote I/O and Ethernet for SCADA/MES). We were able to utilise 13 network node boxes that we designed and built and strategically placed around the site for connection to other process areas.